The Oxford Handbook of Children's Literature

Edited by Julia Mickenberg and Lynne Vallone

Description

The Oxford Handbook of Children's Literature is at once a literary history, an introduction to various theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches, a review of genres, and a selection of original and interdisciplinary essays on canonical and popular works for children in the Anglo-American tradition. It is geared toward graduate students, advanced undergraduates, and scholars new to the study of children's literature, as well as teachers and anyone wishing to keep up with new research and innovative approaches to children's literature. Twenty-six essays by top scholars from varied disciplines address theoretical, historical, sociological, and critical issues through analyses of classic novels such as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Anne of Green Gables, The Swiss Family Robinson, Tom Sawyer, Kidnapped, and Five Little Peppers and How They Grew; early educational and religious works such as The New England Primer and Froggy's Little Brother; picture books, comics and graphic novels such as Millions of Cats, Where the Wild Things Are, the Peanuts series and American Born Chinese; early readers such as The Cat in the Hat and the Frog and Toad books; newer children's classics including Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret, Jade, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, The Circuit, the Harry Potter series and His Dark Materials trilogy; works of poetry such as The Bat Poety and The Dreamkeeper; a play, Peter Pan; and media classics such as Free to Be You and Me and Dumbo. An editors' introduction surveys key trends in criticism, the field's history, and foundational scholarship.

The Oxford Handbook of Children's Literature

Edited by Julia Mickenberg and Lynne Vallone

Author Information

Julia Mickenberg is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States and coeditor of Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children's Literature.

Lynne Vallone is Professor and Chair of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University, the first Ph.D.-granting department of Childhood Studies in the United States. She is the author of Becoming Victoria and Disciplines of Virtue: Girls' Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.

Contributors:

Beverly Lyon Clark is Professor of English at Wheaton College (Massachusetts). Her recent work includes Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children's Literature in America and the Norton Critical Edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

June Cummins is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University, where she specializes in children's literature and Jewish American literature. She has published articles that incorporate a range of perspectives, including feminism, multiculturalism, consumerism, and American identity, and she writes about both American and British literature. She is currently working on a biography of Sydney Taylor, author of the All-of-A-Kind Family series.

Lan Dong is the author of Reading Amy Tan (Greenwood, 2009), Who's the Real Mulan: The Woman Warrior's Cross-Cultural Journey (tentative title, Temple UP, forthcoming 2010), and several articles and book chapters on Asian/Asian American literature and films, children's literature, and comics. She is currently editing a collection of critical essays on transnational Asian American heroines and another volume on teaching graphic narratives in the literature classroom. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and is Assistant Professor of English at University of Illinois Springfield where she teaches Asian American literature and culture, world literature, and graphic narratives.

Richard Flynn is Professor of Literature at Georgia Southern University where he teaches children's and adolescent literature and modern and contemporary poetry. He has written extensively about children's poetry and about childhood in the works of Randall Jarrell, Gwendolyn Brooks, June Jordan, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop and others. He edited the Children's Literature Association Quarterly from 2004-2009.

M. O. Grenby is the author of The Child Reader 1700-1840 (forthcoming) and Children's Literature (2008), and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Children's Literature (2009) and Popular Children's Literature in Britain (2008). He has also published several studies of late eighteenth-century culture, including The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution (2001). He is Reader in Children's Literature in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University, U.K.

Marah Gubar is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Children's Literature Program at the University of Pittsburgh. Her book Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children's Literature (Oxford University Press, 2009) won the Children's Literature Association Book Award.

Kelly Hager teaches Victorian literature and children's literature at Simmons College. She is the author of Dickens and the Rise of Divorce: The Failed-Marriage Plot and the Novel Tradition (Ashgate 2010) and a contributor to Keywords for Children's Literature, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children's Literature, and The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader.

Charles Hatfield: [bio to come]

Kenneth Kidd is Associate Professor of English at the University of Florida, where he teaches seminars in children's literary and cultural studies. He is the author of Making American Boys (U Minnesota Press) and coeditor of Wild Things (Wayne State UP).

Peter Hunt was the first specialist in Children's Literature to be appointed full Professor of English in a British University (Cardiff). He has written or edited 24 books, and written over 120 articles on the subject, and is currently editing The Wind in the Willows, Treasure Island and The Secret Garden for Oxford University Press World's Classics. In 2003 he won the Brothers Grimm Award for services to children's literature, from the International Institute for Children's Literature, Osaka. His latest book is the four-volume Children's Literature: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies (2006).

Michelle Martin, Associate Professor of English at Clemson University in South Carolina, published Brown Gold: Milestones of African-American Children's Picture Books, 1845-2002 with Routledge in 2004 and co-edited (with Claudia Nelson) Sexual Pedagogies: Sex Education in Britain, Australia, and America, 1879-2000 (Palgrave, 2003). Martin is currently working on a book-length critical examination of the collaborative and individual works that Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes wrote for young people during their friendship and collaborative working relationship that lasted from the 1920s until the 1960s.

Julia Mickenberg is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, The Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States (Oxford, 2006), which won several awards, including the Children's Literature Association's Book Award. She is also co-editor (with Philip Nel) of Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children's Literature (NYU, 2008). Her essays on children's literature have appeared in American Literary History, American Quarterly, The Cambridge History of the Novel, and elsewhere.

Claudia Nelson is professor of English and affiliated professor of women's and gender studies at Texas A&M University. In addition to coediting three anthologies of critical articles, she is the author of four books, Family Ties in Victorian England (Praeger, 2007), Little Strangers: Portrayals of Adoption in America, 1850-1929 (Indiana, 2003), Invisible Men: Fatherhood in Victorian Periodicals, 1850-1910 (Georgia, 1995), and Boys Will Be Girls: The Feminine Ethic and British Children's Fiction, 1857-1917 (Rutgers, 1991).

Nathalie op de Beeck is Associate Professor of English at Pacific Lutheran University, where she directs the program in Children's Literature and Culture. She is the author of Suspended Animation: Children's Picture Books and the Fairy Tale of Modernity, and her projects include Litle Machinery: A Critical Facsimile Edition.

Leslie Paris is an Associate Professor of History at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of Children's Nature: The Rise of the American Summer Camp (New York University Press, 2008). She has also coedited volumes on Adirondack summer camps, vulnerable children in Canada and the United States, and American girls of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Currently, she is writing a history of American childhood from 1965-1980.

Mavis Reimer is Canada Research Chair in the Culture of Childhood and Professor of English at the University of Winnipeg in Canada, where she directs the programs and activities of the Centre for Research in Young People's Texts and Cultures. She is co-author of the third edition of The Pleasures of Children's Literature (2003), editor of the collection of essays, Home Words: Discourses of Children's Literature in Canada (2008), and lead editor of the journal Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures.

Kimberley Reynolds is Professor of Children's Literature in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University in the UK. She was President of the International Research Society for Children's Literature (2003 - 2007). Recent publications include Radical Children's Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations (2007), which received the ChLA Book Award in 2009, and Children's Literature Studies: A Handbook to Research (co-editor, forthcoming 2010).

Teya Rosenberg teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in children's literature, fantasy, magical realism, Canadian literature, and introductory critical theory and practice at Texas State University-San Marcos, where she is an associate professor in the Department of English. She has published articles on magical realism in children's literature and co-edited Diana Wynne Jones: An Exciting and Exacting Wisdom (Lang 2002) and Considering Children's Literature: A Reader (Broadview 2008).

Nicholas Sammond is an Associate Professor in the Cinema Studies Institute and English Department at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960 (Duke UP, 2005). He is currently working on the book Biting the Invisible Hand: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Industrialization of American Animation (Duke UP, forthcoming).

Karen Sánchez-Eppler is Professor of English and American Studies at Amherst College. The author of Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body (1993) and Dependent States: The Child's Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (2006), she is currently working on a book tentatively titled The Unpublished Republic: Manuscript Cultures of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century US, which will include a chapter on the Hale libraries. She is one of the founding editors of The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth.

Katharine Capshaw Smith is an associate professor of children's literature and African American literature at the University of Connecticut. She is the Editor of Children's Literature Association Quarterly and author of Children's Literature of the Harlem Renaissance.

Phillip Serrato is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University. A specialist in Chicano/a literary and cultural studies, his publications include essays on the Personal Memoirs of Juan Seguín, the children's television program Dragon Tales, and books for children by Chicano/a authors such as Luis J. Rodríguez and Gloria Anzaldúa.

Kevin Shortsleeve is an Assistant Professor at Christopher Newport University in Virginia. He received his undergraduate degree from Emerson College in Boston, a Masters from The University of Florida and PhD from Oxford. He has published academic work on the subjects of literary nonsense, Edward Gorey and Walt Disney. He is also the author of several children's books, including Thirteen Monsters Who Should Be Avoided.

Eric L. Tribunella is an assistant professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi, where he teaches children's and young adult literature. He is the author of Melancholia and Maturation: The Use of Trauma in American Children's Literature (U of Tennessee Press, 2010).

Lynne Vallone is Professor and Chair of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University. She is the author of a number of articles on children's literature and culture as well as Disciplines of Virtue: Girls' Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Yale UP) and Becoming Victoria (Yale UP). She is also a co-associate general editor of the Norton Anthology of Children's Literature and is currently writing a book on the miniature and gigantic in children's literature and culture.

Courtney Weikle-Mills is assistant professor of Children's Literature and Early American Literature at the University of Pittsburgh. Her article, "'Learn to Love Your Book': The Child Reader and Affectionate Citizenship" appeared in volume 43 of Early American Literature. She is currently at work on a book manuscript tentatively titled "Imaginary Citizens: Child Readers and the Making of an American Literary Public, 1700-1868."

Karin E. Westman is Associate Professor and Department Head of English at Kansas State University, where she teaches courses on modern and contemporary British literature, including children's literature. She has published Pat Barker's Regeneration: A Reader's Guide (Continuum, 2001) as well as essays on Virginia Woolf, Georgette Heyer, A. S. Byatt, Pat Barker, and J. K. Rowling; forthcoming publications include J. K. Rowling's Library: Harry Potter in Context (UP of Mississippi).

Naomi Wood is an associate professor of English at Kansas State University, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in children's and young adult literature. She has published articles on a range of fantasy writers from Charles Kingsley and George MacDonald in the nineteenth century to E. Nesbit and C.S. Lewis in the twentieth, and to Philip Pullman and others in the twenty-first. She is working on a book about the theological and cultural work of children's fantasy fiction.

The Oxford Handbook of Children's Literature

Edited by Julia Mickenberg and Lynne Vallone

Reviews and Awards

Winner of the Children's Literature Association Edited Book Award

"Any institution with children's literature classes will definitely want a copy, but given the resonant approaches and wide applicability, there's much here for people teaching any of these texts or for those looking for new ways to enrich a literary syllabus." --Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

"This rich compendium both instructs and delights...Remarkably researched...This collection pushes boundaries of genre, notions of childhood, and critical scaffolding more forcefully than does Cambridge Companion to Literature...Essential. All readers." --Choice

"This handbook is in the best tradition of vitality and clarity...The qualtiy of the scholarship is high, the editing sure, presentation appealing and the referencing full and unfussy...A sophisticated collection that passes both the dip-test and the long haul...It can be wholly recommended." --Times Literary Supplement